Photograph: Left, by David Strick/Redux; right, by Rebecca Greenfield/Polaris.

Bikram Choudhury’s eponymous brand of hot yoga has drawn thousands of fans. But in just the last year, writes Vanity Faircontributor Benjamin Wallace in the January issue, five women have filed lawsuits against Choudhury, with charges ranging from rape to sexual harassment.

Most of the plaintiffs tell similar stories. Choudhury allegedly singled out a naïve young woman for attention, groomed her with talk of her cosmic specialness, made progressively more sexual overtures, and responded to rejection with angry threats:

Jane Doe 2 tells Wallace that at first she was flattered that Choudhury DH paid her special attention when she attended one of his twice-yearly teacher trainings in September 2010, for which her boyfriend had paid $10,900. Choudhury told her after one class, “There were hundreds of bodies in that room tonight but you were the only one that listened to me.” But she says his advances quickly escalated: he held her after class one day and asked her to move to L.A. to work at his studio. “I can see something inside of you that no one else can,” he allegedly told her. “You will be greater than Mother Teresa, but you have to follow me. You have to do everything I tell you to do.” He gripped her hand and stared at her. “I am your guru,” he said. “I am your god…. Without me, you will be a piece of gold undiscovered and covered in dirt.” Another night, according to her lawsuit, he again pressed his case for her to come and work for him, asking that she come up to his room to talk. He assured her they would not be alone, but as soon as they entered his room, she realized her mistake. They were alone. When she started to walk out, according to her suit, he began crying and begging her to “save” him, and forced himself on her.

Sarah Baughn tells Wallace that she took her first Bikram yoga class in 2004, and made a rapid ascent in the competitive-yoga world, placing second in both the nationals and internationals in 2006. When she attended Choudhury’s teacher training, she was flattered by the guru’s attention, but also found it uncomfortable. She says he kept her after class, told her they knew each other from a past life, and kissed her on the cheek. On the fifth day of training, according to the lawsuit filed this past March by Baughn, Choudhury called her into his office and said, “Should we make this a relationship?” Shocked, she says, she protested and made her way out of the office. Later, at the 2008 national championships, she tied for first place, but at the internationals the next day, she came in second, despite what she believed was a clear victory. According to the lawsuit, one of the judges told Baughn that all the judges had scored her as the winner, and another judge told a teacher who frequently volunteered at Choudhury’s headquarters that Choudhury had overruled the judges’ decision. Baughn was later offered the opportunity to assist at one of the 2008 training camps, where Choudhury’s harassment became physical as he pushed her against a door and groped her. Despite her abilities, Baughn alleges that Choudhury wouldn’t permit her to teach advanced seminars, and that his office contacted studios that had scheduled her to teach and discouraged them from allowing it.

Larissa Anderson found Bikram yoga emotionally healing, she tells Wallace, and through her then boyfriend grew close to the Choudhury family. One night after dining with the family at their home, Anderson says, Choudhury asked her to give him a massage while he watched a Bollywood movie. Eventually, she says, she started to nod off from fatigue, but Choudhury asked her to stay, then tried to kiss her. She said no, but Choudhury persisted and raped her, according to her suit. Over the next five years, she remained in the Bikram community and came to believe that “her life would be over” if she left. But she kept her distance from Choudhury until she assisted at a teacher training in 2011. While giving him a massage in his suite, Anderson found herself suddenly left alone with him, and her suit alleges he kept asking her to massage higher up his leg, eventually saying, “Are you sure you don’t want to sleep with me tonight?” Her suit also claims that he pressed his body into hers against the wall as she repeatedly rebuffed him. Finally, she was able to leave. According to her lawsuit, after that, he wouldn’t list her studio on his Web site or otherwise promote it, in violation of the affiliation agreement she’d signed. Anderson says she has experienced “PTSD, anxiety, and depression” as a result of Choudhury’s actions.

Choudhury’s former in-house counsel, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, filed a suit earlier this year alleging, among other things, discrimination, sexual harassment, and defamation. Jafa-Bodden alleges that before firing her Choudhury intimated that she should pressure a witness in a suit to stay silent, discussed having a federal judge who’d ruled against Choudhury “taken out,” and wanted her to falsely accuse a male studio owner of sexual misconduct, including being a “rapist.”

Jane Doe 1, like Jane Doe 2, filed suit early last May. Choudhury insisted at the fall teacher training in 2011 that he had a “gift” for her, a “transmission,” because they “thought the same.” Another night soon after, she says, he told her, “I have never met someone who had a mind quite like my guru. You have the divine in you. You have been touched by God.” One morning, according to her suit, while doing her duty of tidying his suite and making sure there was fresh fruit, Choudhury surprised her and forced her onto the bed, then raped her.

In outward appearance, Choudhury is a flashy showboat who wears crocodile shoes and gangster fedoras. He owns dozens of Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, and the like (including Howard Hughes’s Royal Daimler, with a toilet in back), and lives in an 8,000-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion seemingly built entirely from gold, stone, and mirrors. He claims to sleep only two hours a night, and he is given to swaggering pronouncements—e.g., “I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 mega-tons each. Nobody fucks with me.”

Choudhury regularly makes outlandish, non-F.D.A./F.T.C.-approved claims for his yoga. Wallace reports that in a 2012 sworn-testimony video, and therefore under penalty of perjury, Choudhury claims that Harvard University is erecting a “Bikram building in their campus.” Kevin Galvin, a spokesperson for Harvard University, responds, “We checked with our capital-projects group and can confirm that no new ‘building’ in the usual sense of that term is under construction funded by Mr. Choudhury or by a donation in his name.”

A handful of studios, including Larissa Anderson’s, have dropped Bikram from their names. “It’s just really clear that there’s some serious issues going on, and I didn’t want to be part of it,” says one studio owner who says she found it distasteful to brush Choudhury’s hair when she attended teacher training, and who decided to rename her studio after the Baughn suit was filed. Then, when the three other suits were filed, she decided to phase Bikram yoga out of her curriculum altogether. “When more of the sexual allegations came out, I couldn’t teach the series anymore and so I started slowly taking the classes away. I can’t call myself a yoga teacher and then protect Bikram and put money in his pocket.”

Tony Sanchez, an original Bikram protégé who now teaches his own brand of yoga outside Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, takes a longer view. “I think Bikram was a different person at the beginning,” Sanchez says. “He had a lot of intentions to help people. I believe what happened is, along the way, he had too many disappointments with people who were not loyal to him, including me. After he dismissed me, and I didn’t grovel back and cry, he was disappointed. And I believe it’s like the skinny person who finds himself eating a lot of junk food, and eventually that person becomes an obese person. Bikram was spiritually pure and all of that, and then he found himself with so many opportunities to fail, to succeed, and he took them all, and eventually he became an obese person with all his karmic shit that he has to deal with.”

(Choudhury declined to be interviewed to respond to questions.)

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